๐ŸŽ‰ 15 Year Anniversary Celebration ๐ŸŽ‰

TFW you cannot draw animals ๐Ÿ˜‚

Haha, well, I guess I made it sound more fancy than it really is, but hey, this blog has finally reached the impressive age of 15! Can you believe it? I bet there are some hardcore otome gamers out there who were probably just babies when this blog started, and now they’re all grown up, buying localized games on their Nintendo Switch! So, it’s time for my yearly grandma-style reminiscing about all the games I played in the past year. Let’s get nostalgic, shall we?

IYKYK

Before we dive into the game list let’s go over a few things that happened in the past year. First there was a lot of drama with Broccoli this year. It began with their April Fool’s ็‚ŽไธŠ when they made some ridiculous project with female idols and awakened the wrath of UtaPri yumejos.

I mean damn it’s so bad their stock literally plummeted ๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚ In addition not only did they ignore the foreign UtaPri shining live pleas for merging their accounts with the Japan server, they also announced the shut down of their Shining Live Japan servers too! It seems like Broccoli wants to move on from UtaPri (I mean hell before UtaPri the only thing I associated with them was Digi Charat!?) and move back to male-centric idol activities I guess. ๐Ÿค” Good thing UtaPri is long behind me, but I feel a bit sorry for the fans who have kept up with it this long. Fortunately I noticed Broccoli’s Greed back during the KamiAso era and peaced the fuck out.

Other than that, I’ve kinda been living under a rock ’cause I’ve been super busy with moving to a new place and getting a second kitten! So now I have two adorable fur babies to take care of, and one of them has been having a bunch of tummy troubles. It’s like we’re playing detective trying to figure out which food is causing all the problems. We still haven’t cracked the case, but we might be getting closer to finding out what the culprit is! On top of all that, I finally upgraded from those crappy gaming chairs. Graduating to something better feels amazing! ๐ŸŽ“

Alright, get ready for a wild ride through that epic thread I was just telling you about! Picture this: the gaming chair from hell had me trapped in all sorts of wonky postures, wreaking havoc on my poor arms and shoulders. Can you believe I ignored it for a solid six months? Yeah, I’m a pro in the art of denial. But things got real ugly, so I went on a doctor-hopping spree, visiting not one, not two, but three of ’em! And now, guess where I’m at? A freakin’ chiropractor! I’m counting on this back-cracking maestro to whip me back into shape and ditch the pain. Ah, the joys of aging, am I right? Health freak that I am, I even splurged on a fancy-pants standing desk and an insanely expensive “gaming” chair. Life always finds a way to keep us on our toes, dude! Who knows what’s coming next? But hey, I’m optimistic – there’s gotta be some sweet relief and good times ahead, right?

How It Started:

Mistakes were made.

How It’s Going:

Good thing I had a 20% off coupon to make this slightly less painful on my wallet.

Guess what? My year was all about just four otome games. Yep, you heard it right, a whopping total of four! Gone are the days when I used to gobble up four otome games a month. It’s like the otome gaming universe decided to hit the pause button. I’ve become such a discerning gamer now, doing my research and reading reviews before I even think about purchasing. And here’s the twist: I’ve gone digital! No more physical editions cluttering my place. I can’t even sell them because apparently, BookOff thinks anime figures are the only thing worth their time. Can’t blame a girl for going digital and not becoming a miniaturized GameStop, right? Looks like Cupid Parasite FD may be the last physical edition I ever buy, as I kickstart my digital game collection. Who needs shelf space when you’ve got digital bliss, amirite?

Three Dumbasskateers

And in social media news, I’ve kinda ragequit Twitter. Ever since the Elongated Muskrat took over, it’s just been going down hill. My final straw was basically seeing how my posts were basically being hidden from not just my followers, but my friends too. How am I being followed by 3.5k people but I only get 157 views? HMMMM. Not to mention Twitter has become a cesspool and basically unbearable ever since they got rid of Tweet Deck. I installed a Firefox addon that basically makes Twitter readable again, but unless everyone is using this addon, we’re basically back to square one of “my posts aren’t being seen by anyone.” In addition, I noticed I was just getting mentally exhausted from logging in to twitter and constantly seeing some kind of fandom drama. I try not to dig deep into fandoms anymore because I’m too old for this shit, so I’ve kinda quietly faded into oblivion and moved myself over to Instagram for FFXIV screenshots and Threads for my art scribbles. For anyone interested in my “opinions” you will just have to stop by my Twitch stream to hear them live! ๐Ÿ˜‚ Maybe if Twitter stops sucking I will come back, but I can only see it sinking like the Titanic at this rate. I will keep my account because as you can see, I have way too many tweets embedded into this blog to toss it into the burning dumpster fire.

I ended up naming my PS5 Natsuhiko

Alrighty, ladies and gents! Buckle up for the grand spectacle of my annual game awards! Forget about those boring traditional “awards”, I’m taking a different approach. We’re diving into each game and putting them firmly in two categories: AWESOME and AWFUL. No middle ground here, folks. These games either rocked our socks or, well, they sucked (in my humble opinion, and maybe my better half’s too). So grab your favorite beverage, sit back, and let’s dive into all the games we’ve played over the past year!

The Bad

Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 3rd

This felt like the most unnecessary sequel that could have been a DLC. Until Estelle showed up, I was bored out of my mind grinding pointless maze dungeons with Kevin and co.

Sonic Generations

This game was actually unplayable because the Steam Port was so bad that it crashed non stop. The most I made it was about 1 zone before it crashed yet again! This is the sad truth about most Steam ports unfortunately. The developers just poop it out and never bother fixing the bugs. Instead they just discount the game at 90% so that even if it sucks you just shrug it off as “I only paid $5 for it.”

Sonic Adventure 2

This was one of those games I’ve always wanted to play when I was a kid and I finally got to play it but 20 something years later you start to think “hmm maybe this wasn’t such a great game after all”. Well rather, just like with the Sonic game above it, it suffered from “old game syndrome” in which the camera was so god awful we actually couldn’t finish this game because some levels just became a terribad guessing game of “I hope where I jump is the right spot cause I can’t see shit.”

Sonic Frontiers

Concluding my run through 3 terrible Sonic games in a row, I think this one finally sealed the deal that I’d never play a Sonic game ever for the rest of my life. I mean if I wanted to watch an Evangelion ripoff, I’d just whip out my 20 year old DVD collection and my Rebuild Movie blu-rays ok Sega?

Valkyrie Elysium

Oh boy this game was so forgettable I actually forgot every single character’s name in it. I only remember that Ishida Akira voiced one of the pokemon husbandos and Hanae Natsuki was at the ~true love interest~ but there’s no way I was gonna grind trash 5 times in a row just to unlock that ending. Thank god for people who suffer in my place and post the cut scenes on youtube!

Star Ocean: The Divine Force

Oooh boy where do I even begin with this disaster. Most notable failures like terrible gearing system, terrible lighting, terrible maps, completely EMPTY LONG fields you have to just run (or fly through with Duma-chan), and the biggest epic fail of course: 2 separate protagonist routes but NO NG+ to do the 2nd run through! Epic Fail!!

Majestic Majolical

Oh look an otome game!? This game was so strange in where I don’t really hate it, but it was such a copy pasta that I didn’t really like it either. But it had a lot of Tsunderes? And it added a route which basically is totally necessary to complete the story that wasn’t in the original segmented releases! And also it had really good yandere endings because the heroine would be the one going yandere, which is not something you usually see in these games!

Persona 4 Dancing All Night

I actually love the Persona 4 soundtrack but this game remixed all my favorite songs in a way that made them so annoying that I actually really disliked them!! On top of this for some reason Atlus couldn’t be bothered to import a Japanese voice over option so I was stuck with the most cringe English dubs circa 2010. ๐Ÿ˜ซ

Persona 5 StrikerS

I can’t even begin to describe how IRRITATING the system was in this game. It’s like 90% grinding tons and tons of trash and 10% story. Seeing how the biggest win for me in Persona 5 Royal was the story, this game failed so hard for me that I decided to just avoid anymore spinoff Persona games.

Persona 3 Portable – FeMC Route Only

The only memorable thing in this game is being able to date MULTIPLE DUDES like a harem but not get a harem ending because almost all of them eventually vanish from the game except Akihiko. The only other stable option is the 10 year old shota but….10 year old shota come on now. ๐Ÿ‘ฎโ€โ™‚๏ธ While I did enjoy the social links, the Tartarus dungeon was irritating and unbearable mostly because of the “old game” problem. Fortunately it seems like it will be remade much better in Persona 3 Reload so I’m looking forward to playing the MaleMC route next February. Still, Kotone will be missed.

Horizon Forbidden West

There are a lot of great things about Horizon, but the skill and job balance is certainly not one of them. It’s like the game just wants to force you into a “sneak archer type” skill set over and over and the targeting in this game is so annoying that it was completely miserable for me all around. While I enjoyed the story, overall the game expects you to basically play the previous game and then play the FOLLOWING UPCOMING game because it once again ends on a cliffhanger. I suppose if you were playing these games back to back post release it wouldn’t be as bad, but playing 1 game in the middle of the series was really confusing. Despite my complaints though, the best thing in this game was the photo mode. It’s the best photo mode I’ve ever seen in any offline RPG.

Radiant Tale: Fanfare FD

Oh my what is this, another otome game appears in the wild! While Radiant Tale wasn’t particularly on my epic games list, I figured the FD would be a nice cute way to spend time. Unfortunately the writers wanted me to spend time with random side characters more than the main cast. Only Liyan and Jinnia felt like they got their true romance routes, but even so, everything was so SHORT. 2.5 hours to complete a route?? I don’t even play that fast but damn. There wasn’t even really any interesting bonus content aside the usual music/image gallery. I can tell Otomate is starting to get cheap with their releases and I’m skeptic of spending so much money on the Cupid Parasite FD but we’ll see how that goes in another post.

Puss in Combat Boots (Gunka wo Haitta Neko)

This game had SO much potential to be a miqote Nier Automata ripoff (which it was but not all the way). If they just stuck to that theme, it would have actually been great. Instead I was basically stuck listening to cat people political bullshit for hours. The truth end finally got back to my Nyan Automata, but it was all so short and sudden (aka only the last 10% of the route finally covered this) that by the time I finished I wished I had gone with my initial gut instinct when this game out in Japan and just never bothered. Don’t let the fact that the Taisho Alice company released this game fool you. It’s not remotely as good as that game was.

Eternights

Did you ever wish you were a year 2000 4chan troll eroge protagonist? Well then this game is for you. The only truly redeeming (?) quality is from a creator’s POV I give props to the dude who mostly solo-created the entire thing. However he had no direction and could have really used a 2nd opinion before deciding to go with that horrendously clunky battle system. He should have just made it a visual novel, especially considering you can get multiple waifu endings – but since all the endings are basically copy and paste of each other it’s not even worth a 2nd play through. I try not to be too critical of indy games, but unfortunately the negatives just outweigh the positives (?) here.

Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn DLC

You’re probably wondering what a DLC is doing here but Bamco promised this to be kind of like a stand alone expansion pack and they charged me $20 for about 20 hours of game play so you would THINK it could be a nice stand alone addon to the TOA series. Unfortunately it failed in every aspect and they didn’t even give me a proper Shion/Alphen proposal scene despite having a literal marriage prep quest in the game. But thanks for the forgettable new character that bugged out my game and forced me to restart 3 times.

The Good

Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival

Bringing back the greatness of Taiko no Tatsujin V version, Rhythm Festival brought back a super cute RPG story in the game. It was much easier this time around vs the Vita edition and it was really cute! I enjoyed a few of the different modes and outfits. Like with most music games now, it also introduced a subscription service and at the time of playing the amount of songs was very little, but if they continue to add more songs to it, then this can be a great game. Unfortunately Bamco is greedy (like Ubisoft) so they may end up just releasing more Taiko games and new subscription services with songs being split up between them. Hopefully that doesn’t happen but it’s nice to have the option for more than just songs that come with the game.

FF7: Crisis Core Reunion

My husband thinks I’m bonkers for putting this game into the good category because the system was so stupid and trash-grindy like Valkyrie Elysium…however! I simply went on the fact that like with Tales of the Abyss, the system was shit, but I just loved the characters. Zack and Aerith shipping was great, baby Cloud and baby Tifa were so cute, and seeing Gackt as a villain was more entertaining than I expected. Oh yea Sephiroth was there too but whatever. ๐Ÿคฃ

Bustafellows 2

Finally, my favorite otome game of the year! You know when you look at Radiant Tale FD and realize how it adds absolutely nothing to the original game but Bustafellows is different. They actually managed to write additional content that adds a lot of lore and interesting things to the original story. There’s no “AU” there’s no “reset ending” , no we just continue literally where we left off. It’s like watching a direct movie sequel. Honestly, it was amazing, I loved every part of it and my boy Crow finally gets laid (ยด๏ผ›ฯ‰๏ผ›๏ฝ€) Baby’s all grown up now!! If you enjoyed Bustafellows, you absolutely must play Bustafellows 2. Hopefully Extend will figure out a way to get it in English to everyone after what happened with PQube. They hinted at a Bustafellows 3 at the end of this game so I’m looking forward to the next installment of the series, which will hopefully add some Adam content this time!

Persona 5 Royal

I remember not initially playing Persona 5 because Atlus did some dumb shit and disabled screenshots on it and I was like wut I ain’t buying a game where I can’t take a million screenshots! And so I waited like 7 years and voila I finally got to play it, with a ton of QOL features to boot. Oh yea there was 2 new chars added but they sucked and honestly the game would have been fine without them. ๐Ÿคก It may not have been as funny as Persona 4 Golden, but it’s alright, cause I really loved the cast of P5 and Joker also stole my heart (I have a thing for Phantom Thieves don’tcha know?)

Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight

Unlike it’s Persona 4 counterpart, Persona 5 Dancing game allowed me to actually set the Japanese voices. That said the game began default on English but the voices didn’t really bother me? Clearly the voice acting has gotten better in the last decade without people trying to sound like a 90s anime girl. Additionally, Persona 5 felt less grindy for the achievements and I was able to platinum the whole game. The songs were also very similar sounding to the original without it being some terrible dubstep remix so overall I was pretty satisfied, even if it didn’t have a really involved overarching story like P4D did.

Final Fantasy XVI

Me: *complains about lack of romance in JRPGs* FF16: Watch this. Me: ๐Ÿซฃ๐Ÿซฃ๐Ÿซฃ๐Ÿซฃ Anyway needless to say now whenever we play a JRPG, Kanade will claim that every game should have an ero scene like FF16 and that FF16 now holds the tier for best JRPG ero scene ever. ๐Ÿคฃ๐Ÿคฃ๐Ÿคฃ Never expected this from a producer who is anti-mod in FFXIV but I guess he wants to keep an MMO “family friendly”?? Idk. Regardless though, it was a great game in the Final Fantasy series, and anyone raging that it doesn’t feel like a “Final Fantasy” should just STFU and go play FF3 until their head explodes.

Shuen no Virche: Epic Lycoris

Honestly this game is borderline bad from the fact that 2 characters never get their truly happy endings while others do, and the fact that some of the CGs looked like they were AI generated and then edited by Otomate’s copycat staff. That said, the Ankou + Ankou Lore route were an amazing addition to the game and well I frankly enjoyed my time in Yves and Scien’s routes so for those things I put this into my good game list. It’s still a huge improvement over the misery that the first game was (unless you are a fan of Mathis or Lucas in which case you are screwed a 2nd time.)

Afterword

Otome fandom drama is a never ending roller coaster ride isn’t it

After a decade and a half, I’ve made the momentous choice to switch my blog’s theme to DARK MODE. It’s pretty mind-blowing, isn’t it? The driving force behind this decision was the acquisition of a colossal 32-inch monitor. The blinding white screen that incessantly assaulted my vision became increasingly bothersome, prompting me to opt for the soothing embrace of dark mode. Admittedly, this alteration may disrupt some of my previous posts where white text was employed, but in all honesty, who even reads those anymore? Let’s face it, the era of avid blog readership is long gone. To all those who have taken the time to peruse this post, I can only assume that you, like me, are a kindred spirit in the realm of otome boomer enthusiasts. We share a common fondness for immersing ourselves in the written word, rather than relying solely on fleeting 10-second TikTok video reviews.

You know you’ve been otome gaming too long when you’ve seen Hakuoki get ported on 5 different systems. ๐Ÿคก

I’ve also done a few housekeeping items. For one, I finally just renamed the blog to Bread Master Lee. Oh that’s not the blog name you say? Well actually the blog’s name was ใ‹ใ‚ใ„ใ„ใ˜ใ‚ƒใชใใ‚ƒใƒ€ใƒกใชใฎ๏ผ (Must be Cute!) But nobody ever used that name anyway. I don’t think most people even knew that was the blog name because in the end, people just look at the domain name. Maybe I should have made my domain name be “MustBeCute.com” or something but I decided to make it breadmasterlee because that’s what WordPress kept recommending me because of the old Google Translate term for Pang Mastery. ๐Ÿ˜‚โ›ณ I’ve also removed my shopping guide cause most people just buy localized games now and don’t import anyway. A lot of makers are making their games be available on Steam as well so only crazy people like me still import Japanese games (or what’s left of them anyway.) Over at my Twitch Channel I’ve finally caved in and bought a new theme/overlay set. Up until now I’ve kinda used free assets/made my own but it was getting a bit stale after 2 years and I wanted something that has a nice organized feel to it.

So anyway where’s my FFXIV otome game? I want a 3P end with Urianger and Estinien pls ๐Ÿ˜ฉ๐ŸคŒ

I want to give a shoutout to all you amazing peeps who still swing by this blog, even if it’s not really all about otome anymore. I’ve kind of moved on, you know? Most otome games are now just hanging out in my “meh, maybe I’ll snag it on sale” category, just like when I usually buy a JRPG. It’s been pretty chill just blabbering away in my own little corner of the internet all these years. It’s hilarious to look back at some of my posts and laugh at the absurd games I’ve endured. Now, let’s be real, most new otome gamers who started with localized games probably have no clue that I even exist. But honestly, I don’t even mind. It’s awesome that otome games are becoming more mainstream in the West. We don’t need everyone fighting over the same “spot” and bickering about differing opinions (although, let’s be honest, that still happens over at the Otomegame Reddit, amiright? ๐Ÿ˜‚). I always thought that when otome games started fading away, I’d shut this blog down. But now, I’m enjoying writing about all my gaming adventures, especially with my hubby chiming in on my reviews. His take on a game is usually worlds apart from mine, so it helps me see things from a different perspective during the same play-through. Keep on rocking, my friends, thanks for sticking around and thanks for 13 million page views!!

Shout out to Kanade for helping me with this chart.

I expect the next couple of years to be very similar in terms of gaming for me, and I look forward to writing about my gaming adventures as long as I can afford to keep paying the blog domain fees (or I finally run out my 3GB space allowance lol.) So, brace yourself for the wild ride ahead. Together, we’ll conquer virtual worlds, battle mythical creatures, and probably rage-quit a few times too. But fear not, for I shall document every glorious moment for your entertainment and my sanity. Stay tuned for more gaming content, and may the Wi-Fi be strong and the loading screens short!